Saturday, September 19, 2015

Austrian Amb. Konstantin Dumba complains to Secretary of State Robert Lansing that his communications with his home government have been so censored by the US (he has to rely on US-controlled wireless stations, while his Allied counterparts can use the trans-Atlantic cables from Canada) that Vienna is likely to recall him without even knowing that he denies having violated any US laws with his plans to disrupt US munitions production. He continues to assert that his only aim was to protect his countrymen from inadvertently violating Austro-Hungarian law, which would be a good argument if his captured unencyphered letter hadn’t talked about disrupting munitions manufacturing.